


Eighteen

by myhomeistheshire



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Stolen Century Focused, it's All About Lucretia babey
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-11
Updated: 2019-03-11
Packaged: 2019-11-15 10:47:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,769
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18071969
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/myhomeistheshire/pseuds/myhomeistheshire
Summary: Lucretia is eighteen when they leave, when they die, when they forget her. (Or: on trauma and loneliness and a ship)





	Eighteen

Lucretia is eighteen years old when she first steps foot on the Star Blaster. She is barely an adult and she is being cast off the edge of the world and told to write it down, and it makes everything inside her sing with happiness, to think of what’s to come.

 

Which is not to say that it's easy. Her crew mystify and amuse her in so many ways. The first time Taako, Magnus, and Merle steal her journal and begin tossing it around in a game of makeshift human-in-the-middle, she cries. Out of frustration and fury and _annoyance_ , and it takes Lup’s gentle reassurances that this is their version of acceptance to realize that it isn’t meant out of spite. That the teasing and antics are nothing like the whispers and catcalls that followed her through school and that maybe, just _maybe_ , she will fit in here after all.

(The three boys return her journal to her shortly after, with red faces and stammered apologies. The next day Lucretia steals Taako’s wand, half to show them up and half to say _hey, I can play this game too_ , and his dumbfounded face is worth all the tears from before.)

 

The journey is hard, but more than anything else it’s _amazing._ The journey is everything she could have imagined, filling her with more emotions than she thought herself capable of - Lucretia is ecstatic and homesick and adventurous and lost. But she doesn’t regret any of it until the first anniversary comes around. Until it’s a Tuesday, and she is nineteen, and Magnus dies.

 

 

It happens out of the blue - the sky is there, and then it isn’t. The world is there, and then it isn’t.

 

They make it to the ship and Lucretia is writing things down frantically - every detail matters here, every shade and movement could be integral later - until she stops at one distinct thought. Magnus isn’t here. Magnus is in the forest.

She tries to run, but Merle holds her back. It’s _here_ , whatever this wave of darkness is, and Davenport is already lifting the ship into the air. She tears her way out of Merle’s grasp and throws herself at the bow, shouting, leaning over. Hoping she’ll see a sign of Magnus before they’ve gone too far - that he’ll be hanging off the side with a lopsided grin and a ridiculous line -

But of course he isn’t.

 

It takes them thirty-seven minutes to reach the border between planes, and the only thing Lucretia can make herself do is write. She writes the last place she saw him, the clothes he was wearing, the last words he said. The letters are sloppy and tear stained, but nothing matters except that there’s a record.

 

And then they cross over. And then he comes back.

 

 

After this it becomes Lucretia’s self appointed duty, as the chronicler of their journey, to write down the deaths. She is eighteen years old but she is so much older as she records them one by one in all of their bloody details, hands shaking, the moment they’re over. She feels her capacity for existence stretching and screaming every time she writes down yet another series of blood stained agony - it hurts like nothing she’s ever experienced but she has to, so she can read through it later in heartrending detail, searching for some sort of cipher or key or clue - like somewhere in these pages she will find a solution to their cycles of ending. When she looks back though, the pages of Magnus's first death are so stained that she has to rewrite it. And it is so much worse the second time that from then on she quells the tears, shoving the urge to the back of her mind out of necessity. Her work is important. The details are vital. She is the youngest and the least skilled, and this is all she can do - recount their deaths in blinding symmetry, until the numbers and the pain and the loneliness blur together and the journals are all that is left.

 

...

 

 

When they are taken, she thinks it fitting that the writer of deaths is the one left alone.

 

...

 

 

Lucretia doesn’t realize truly how much she needs them until she’s bereft, without Magnus and Lup to fight off the creatures that come after her, without Davenport to expertly man the helm and Merle to heal her wounds, without Barry’s brain and Taako’s last second spells - she has to be fast and strong and clever, more clever than she’s ever been. She decodes Davenport’s notes as well as she can and then starts learning things on her own through the slow process of trial and error. She tries to dampen her feelings but the one that stifles her is the panic - it terrifies her almost to paralysis at first to think how easily a simple mistake could end everything. But she stores that away, ties and shoves and padlocks it until she can feel her muscles again. She is eighteen. She is the last one. Everything rests on her, now.

 

She tries not to think about it, but she misses them like a constant ache. Like an ocean welling inside of her; like stringed instruments crescendoing in her every moment. She misses Taako’s lighthearted quips and never ending amusement, misses Lup’s fearlessness and Davenport’s unwavering confidence. She misses Barry’s dry humor and the way Merle can make her laugh and sigh at the same time, and she misses the way she can always find kindness in Magnus’s eyes. She misses everything about them, this family she found and then lost, and it hammers in her chest how if she doesn’t win this battle of a year she will lose them all again.

 

 

She passes another nineteenth birthday on day seventy six, and for her gift she writes down a few of her favorite memories. They are all from the journey. Dancing in the galley with Lup while Magnus strums a lyre and Barry stomps his feet and Taako complains about them getting the way of his baking. Magnus and Merle attempting to ride the snake creatures on the water planet. Davenport telling her that she’d been writing for long enough, actually, and Taako stealing her journal before she can object to being drawn into a game of fantasy charades. Ranking sunsets with Magnus and the twins, cataloging every moment of beauty within their reach -

She reads them and pinches her wrist as she thinks of the vast expanse of time that has yet to pass.

 

 

During her time in this barren world, a strange phenomenon begins to take place. For the first time in her existence, Lucretia finds herself avoiding her journals. She writes down the basics - ship repairs, necessary information about the planet, the attacks - but no more. When she writes down the details she shakes with the weight of too much tormented knowledge, and so she restricts it to what she is sure she’ll need later.

 

One night, just over halfway through the year, the marauders who have been tailing her catch up. There are cannonballs flying through the air and creatures climbing over the sides as the Star Blaster falls apart, trembling and shuddering as Lucretia allows herself the fleeting image of everything ending. That night she uses every potion, explosive, heavyweight, and spell slot, and only just makes it out intact. She spends the next three days awake, mending and steering and pleading aloud to please, _please_ , whatever gods are listening, don’t let it go down now. When the ship is finally stable she slumps at the helm and writes it down, blood and sweat and tears staining the page as she records what she needs to. This is day two hundred and four. She stretches out the muscles in her weary legs and tries not to think about the hundred and sixty-one days left.

 

 

But she does it. For three hundred and sixty-five days, she makes it through hurricanes and marauders, past traps and battles and through the exhaustive, echoing loneliness that pervades it all.

 

 

And then it’s the final day. In less than twenty-four hours she will have them back again, as long as she escapes the Hunger - and she plans to. She prepares for every unlikely possibility, hammers and mends and triple checks. She does the final inspection of the ship as the sun begins to set and then makes her last day’s notes - and here is when she is forced to accept the finality that she has not found the light of creation. This thing crushes her, more than the tally marks at the back of her journal depicting every life she’s taken, more than the hopelessness and doubt that has plagued her for this entire year. Before, they could all share the guilt - but not this time. This time the fall of a world settles into the planes of her shoulders, and only hers.

 

 

She watches the horizon and waits for the sky to bleed. When it does she lifts off, excitement and dread and aching all fighting for the forefront of her mind. She watches the plane seep into darkness, sees the border in front of her -

 

…

 

She crosses through it, and they are here. They are _here_.

 

For the first time in one hundred and sixty-one days, Lucretia falls to the deck and lets herself weep.

 

It's strange, dealing with the grief. She has lost them but they have just barely missed her - their number of days fades against the backdrop of her lonely year. And things are different, now. _She_ is different. She doesn’t take them for granted, not _ever_ , but neither does she sit in their shadows. She becomes outspoken and strong willed, challenging Magnus’s self destruction and Taako’s wallowing - she understands it but she does not let it stand. They will be better, they will _do_ better, they will _survive_. If it takes everything in her to make it happen.

 

After this year, Lucretia fights. Against the hunger, the ache, the loneliness - especially the loneliness. Lets it slip through her fingers like sea foam in her hands, accepts and releases the girl she once was. Embraces the woman she has become.

 

Lucretia is eighteen years old, and she has faced the world and won.

 

 

…

 

So the second time it happens, she is prepared. She is ready. She is still eighteen when she decides it is worth the world to lose them all again.

 

Madam Director survives through twelve years alone, and it is worse than her lonely year, until it isn’t. Until it’s over.

 

 

 

Lucretia embraces her friends.

 

 

 

 


End file.
